Why, then, was a single-payer system excluded from consideration and its proponents almost entirely barred from the discussion during the year Obamacare was written? That rejection can only reflect the enormous power of the health industry, which Brill reminds us has the largest lobby in Washington, D.C….

In Taiwan, only about 35% of the 500,000 Austronesian indigenous people can speak their tribal language, said Chang Shin-liang, head of the language and culture department of the government’s Council of Indigenous Peoples.

“We’re facing a dangerous situation for indigenous languages. Seven out of 14 indigenous languages here are listed by Unesco as critically endangered,” said Mr Chang.

Blust’s analysis yields an astonishing pattern. Those 1,200 Austronesian languages fall into ten subgroups, of which nine (containing only 26 languages) are spoken only by the non-Chinese aborigines of the island of Taiwan. The tenth subgroup encompasses all Austronesian languages outside Taiwan, from Madagascar to east Polynesia — all 1,174 of them.

It is as if the Indo-European language family consisted of 1,174 closely related Slavic languages, spoken from Britain to Sri Lanka, with all nine other IndoEuropean language groups — Germanic, Celtic, Hittite, Italic and the rest of them — being confined to Ireland. Previous studies had recognized several distinctive Austronesian language groups on Taiwan, but it had not been appreciated that the number was so high.

When Morales invited “social movements and Mother Earth’s defenders…scientists, academics, lawyers and governments” to come to Cochabamba for a new kind of climate summit, it was a revolt against this experience of helplessness, an attempt to build a base of power behind the right to survive.

‘”Reporters” call a Bangalore number to upload a news item and a text message goes out to all the phone numbers in the contact list and anyone who wants to hear the report calls in to the same number and the message is played out.’http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8617943.stm

“The point is clear: environmentalists have yet to seize the opportunity offered by urbanisation. Two major campaigns should be mounted: one to protect the newly-emptied countryside, the other to green the hell out of the growing cities.”

The social movement in Bolivia continues with the re-election of Evo Morales (whose party is called Movimiento al Socialismo), the first indigenous head of State in Bolivia since the last Incan leader Tupac Amaru.

Wanted to point out something relevant to this blog from a NYT article:

“Despite the financial crisis and a drop in natural gas export revenues, Bolivia’s economy is estimated to have grown as much as 4 percent this year, one of the highest rates in the region, helped by stimulus spending on welfare programs for children, pregnant women and the elderly.”